Winding down…Three days and counting…New phone makes me smile…

Five years ago today, views from the second-floor balcony at Whalers Village in Kaanapali Beach were breathtaking. For more photos from this post, please click here.

The next few days will be action-packed. We need to do laundry, pack our bags, wrap gifts for grandkids, make pumpkin pie for Greg’s family, pack and weigh our bags and on Wednesday, go to the cardiology appointment. 

If time allows, I’d like to head out to the Premium Outlet Mall to buy Tom several Tommy Hilfiger tee shirts. They are very durable, priced right, and will last until the next time we come to the US. 

Hopefully, tomorrow if time allows, my friend Chere and I will make the 45-minute drive tomorrow afternoon, spending every last moment together while I’ll be able to purchase the shirts.

This morning I’m heading to the grandkid’s school to help with lunch for the kids, on a volunteer basis, in place of Camille. Later in the day, I’ll return to complete this post, make edits and upload it.

When I return this afternoon, I’ll get to work on laundry, packing, and gift wrapping. This evening we’ll stay in having dinner with Karen and Rich. She made two delicious crockpots filled with pot roast and veggies. One of the pots was traditional pot roast, and the other was Asian. 

What a meal! We can’t wait for tonight’s leftovers. Karen is quite an accomplished cook. It’s been amazing to dig into some of her treasures! In our old lives, we visited back and forth to each other’s homes for fabulous meals.

As for my new Google world phone…I love it. Not only do we have voice and data anywhere in the world with an installed worldwide SIM card, but its features are leaving me in awe over how technology in the US has changed over the years.

Over the past several years, we’ve had to purchase expensive SIM cards each time we landed in a new country. Those days are long gone. And, although the signal may be sketchy in some parts of the world as it would be with a SIM card, we’ll be connected in over 150 countries for a reasonable pay-as-you-go fee which will usually be no more than $30 a month for voice and data.

Another feature that boggles my mind is our ability to text. We haven’t been able to text outside of any country we’ve been in at any time…only countrywide texting has been available.

Of course, there are charges for calls from other countries, but we’ll use Whatsapp in those cases. Now the challenge is getting family members to load Whatsapp on their phone for free calls, video chats, and text regardless of where we may be at any given time.

Plus, the phones may be used as “hotspots” for our laptops when we can’t get online for whatever reason (power and WiFi outages). This is a massive factor for us. 

The ability for the phone to talk to us and us to it is astounding and done so with great ease. Being able to say, “Where is the closest grocery store?” is mind-boggling for us, a feature we haven’t had access to with our previous obsolete equipment.

We’d hoped to purchase laptops while here but have decided to wait until we get to Arizona, where we’ll have more time to research, shop, and ultimately get everything set up.

Off, I go now to the grandkid’s school. I’ll be back later to wrap this up.

Happy day!

Photo from one year ago, November 25, 2018:

The strength and coordination required of a giraffe to bend this low are astounding.  We could not believe what we were witnessing in our garden. For more photos, please click here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *